The Healing

Chapter 4





1860

What sort a dress you reckon she’ll bring me?” Granada asked for the third time that morning.

It was early dawn and the plantation kitchen was chilly, Granada having neglected the coals in the hearth during the night. The only thing she wore was her rough homespun shimmy. The close-plank floor was cold to her bare feet, but she was too excited to care.

“That dead girl sure got some pretty frocks, don’t she?” Granada asked. “Silk’s my favorite, I reckon.”

When the cook still didn’t respond, Granada called out louder, “Aunt Sylvie! What color you reckon?”

Not bothering to look at Granada, the cook wiped the flour from her hands with the hem of her starched white apron. Sylvie was sturdily built and didn’t stand much taller than the twelve-year-old who presently was doing everything she could think of to get her attention.

“I’m not going to abide no more of this kind of talk in my kitchen,” the cook pronounced, “especially coming from a child as coal black as any swamp slave.” Aunt Sylvie, whose skin was the light color of an underdone biscuit, still hadn’t turned her face from her dough. “You get this way every Preaching Sunday, Granada. Near about wears me out. Please, light somewhere and quiet down.”

Granada wasn’t discouraged. Her mind stayed on the dress and the shoes and the hair ribbons that would be delivered any minute now.

Sylvie clomped to the door in her loose-fitting brogans to peer out across the darkened yard. “Old Silas ain’t even lit a lantern yet,” she grumbled. “I sent that fool Chester over to Silas’s cabin ages ago. He’s going to make my breakfast late sure as the world.”

Though husband and wife, Sylvie and Silas didn’t stay together. Sylvie slept in a room behind the kitchen and Silas stayed alone in his cabin. They both seemed to like it that way. Silas was nearly twice Sylvie’s age, and she said old folks are easier to care for from a distance.

Sylvie turned away from the door and got back to her biscuit dough. “If Silas don’t show pretty soon with some firewood, Granada, I’m going to send you out to the yard and gather some kindling chips. That might work off some of your sass.”

“Aunt Sylvie—”

The cook waved her off. “Baby, stop running your mouth and dip me a cup of sweet milk from the crock. You got me so flustered I done made my dough crumbly.”

Granada stomped her foot at Sylvie, but then did as she was told, with a few groans thrown in for good measure.

She handed the cup to Aunt Sylvie with a dramatic sigh.

“Life must be hard on you Christian martyrs,” Aunt Sylvie said, but Granada saw the smile.

After pouring the milk into her great hickory bowl, Sylvie worked the batter vigorously with her short, blunt fingers. “Thank the Lord Preaching Sunday don’t come every week,” she muttered, lifting her shoulder to wipe her face on the checked gingham dress.

Granada couldn’t understand why the cook didn’t look forward to Preaching Sundays. Everybody else did. Several times a year, the master’s slaves were herded in from miles around, from every settlement the master had built, spread across his four thousand acres of plantation land. Hundreds of black bodies flooded into the yard like a dark, slow-moving river. These were all-day affairs, called by the master when conditions warranted sending for Bishop Kerry to give everybody a good preaching-to. Master Ben invited his white friends from town and neighboring plantations to join him high up on the gallery where they listened to the bishop give the sermon. And Granada got to be at the very center of it all.

Sylvie finally looked down at Granada and shook her head sadly. “You mind your manners today. I don’t think you know how lucky you are not to be out working in them swamps. You come mighty close. Don’t you forget it! If you don’t act right, the mistress can always send you back where she found you, like you know who!”

Granada stuck out her tongue. Aunt Sylvie was always threatening to send Granada to one of the settlements where the field slaves lived. Supposedly that’s where Granada’s mother was moved off to after the cholera. And Sylvie often tried to scare Granada by telling her the story of Lizzie’s little girl with skin the color of cream and eyes like the mistress’s emeralds, all proper and house-raised, now working the swamps like a common field slave. “If it can happen to an almost white girl, it can sure happen to you!”

Granada forced that possibility from her mind. The mistress would never allow it, she told herself. And if that woman who was supposed to be Granada’s mother ever tried to lay claim, the girl would fight tooth and nail. She wanted no mother but the mistress.

Sylvie turned toward the cold fireplace, but Granada again stepped into her path, determined Sylvie would not ignore her this time.

“You think it’s going to be silk this time, Aunt Sylvie?” she asked, her ink-black eyes wide and unblinking.

“Listen at you, a kitchen girl talking like she knows something about silk.” She took Granada by the shoulders and swung her aside like a garden gate. “Don’t matter if it’s made out of corn silk. You best learn now, white folks don’t look at you. They only look at what you toting on your back or carrying in your hands. That don’t change because the wrapping is pretty, Granada. Just don’t bring attention to yourself.”

Sylvie shook her head. “What am I saying? The second they see you dressed up like a white girl, they always bust a gut.” She looked at Granada sadly. “Baby, I hope you know they ain’t flattering you. You the mistress’s little joke on the master.”

“I ain’t funny,” Granada said.

“White folks seem to think so. I heard a lawyer tell his wife that coming to Master Ben’s was better than going to the circus. With a trained monkey and a black girl acting like a midget queen, all presided over by a wild-eyed opium fiend.”

The girl had tired of hearing this long ago. Let them laugh if they wanted to. Sometimes Sylvie told Granada how pretty she was, despite her dark skin. But Granada never believed it. After all, the mistress never noticed her without the beautiful clothes. The clothes made her more than beautiful. They made her visible.

Granada sat down at the table and cradled her head in her hands. “Last time, the mistress brought me pretty red satin bows for my hair. Same color as that dress,” she mused, remembering the gown of pale rose gauze trimmed with silver lace. “Remember that, Aunt Sylvie? How pretty I looked fixed up with red bows?” She patted herself on the side of her head.

“I’m telling you, Granada,” Aunt Sylvie said, “tying a scrap of red on a straw broom don’t make it no Christmas tree.”

As she was still talking, a tall, lanky man stepped lightly into the kitchen with an armload of wood.

“Chester, where’s Old Silas?” Aunt Sylvie asked, scowling at the plantation coachman, a handsome, fine-featured fellow who seemed to forever sport a grin that warned of tomfoolery.

“Your man is fussing about his swolled-up feet. Said his dropsy was acting up. I told him he ought to stay in bed. Wants you to bring him a hot pan of water to soak in.”

Sylvie liked to brag how her man Silas was once the topmost man on the plantation, right next to the master. Granada found that hard to believe. Now all Silas did was odd jobs for Sylvie around the kitchen and complain about his feet.

Chester dropped the wood on the hearth with a racket. “Aunt Sylvie, if you’ll be real sweet to me, I’ll fix your fire this morning.”

“Hop to it then,” Sylvie snapped. “Sooner I got a fire, sooner I can get y’all fed. When the house wakes up, y’all have to root, hog, or die on your own. I won’t have time to fool with you. And you tell Silas to get his own water.”

Chester winked at Granada. “I reckon she didn’t hear me say that piece about being sweet.”

Granada tried winking back, but the best she could do was blink.

The coachman knelt down before the hearth and began stacking the wood for the breakfast fire. The pile he made looked like matchsticks in the man-tall fireplace. But by midmorning it would be aglow with the coals from a forest of logs, and the kitchen would be sweltering hot, chock-full with the aromas of roasting meats, bubbling stews, and baking pies, abuzz with the chatter of serving girls. They would keep the master’s guests fed like this for days.

“The house ain’t up yet?” Chester asked. He rose from the fire and brushed bits of bark off his blue wool coat with gleaming brass buttons. The mistress would be furious if she caught him with tarnished buttons. He polished them in the kitchen with ashes every evening.

Aunt Sylvie stood at the smooth oak biscuit block, rolling out the dough. “I sent Lizzie to see about getting the mistress dressed. She usually up pacing the floor about this time. Master still be sleeping.”

“I reckon so!” Chester chuckled. “Master Ben was mighty drunk when I brought him and the bishop home last night. Singing hymns and laughing and carrying on. Should have seen me toting him up the stairs like a sack of oats.”

“Bishop Kerry seen him like that?” Aunt Sylvie asked, acting scandalized.

“Seen him? I had to tote the bishop up next. And he so big, it took me two trips!”

Granada slapped her hand over her mouth and snorted through her fingers. Chester didn’t crack a smile. Sometimes when Granada got tickled over something he said, she had to check twice to see if he was fooling or not. That man lived to prank folks.

Aunt Sylvie shook her head. “Man of God doing that way.”

“The bishop might be a man of God this Sunday morning,” Chester said, “but he sure took a whipping from the devil Saturday night.”

Granada walked up to the cook and tugged on her apron. “Aunt Sylvie, when you going to grease my hair? Mistress be down anytime with my new clothes.”

Aunt Sylvie swatted Granada’s hand away. “Listen to this girl! Talking ’bout her new clothes!”

Chester winked at Granada again and said, “Now let her be, Aunt Sylvie. Ain’t every day she gets to throw off her head rag and play the white girl. Anyway, she as pretty as any white girl I ever seen.”

Sylvie ignored him. “Them clothes ain’t new and they ain’t yours,” she reminded Granada. “Them’s Miss Becky’s clothes.”

Granada had heard all this before, but it meant nothing to her. To Aunt Sylvie, Miss Becky was the beautiful little white girl who looked down sweetly from a gilded frame over the mantel, sitting in a tree swing and cradling a raven-haired doll. But to Granada she wasn’t a person at all. To Granada, Rebecca Satterfield was only a name that signified a pair of locked mahogany wardrobes in an unoccupied bedroom in the great house, both of them crammed full of elegant garments, ribbons, and rare perfumes. When Aunt Sylvie spoke of Miss Becky, she made her sound like somebody the bishop preached about in one of his sermons, all teary eyed and crackly voiced. One of those snowy white angels in heaven.

“Chester, why you still here?” Sylvie fussed. “You ain’t doing nothing but getting in the way. Get on back to the stables. I imagine your brother Mister Mule is missing you about now. Don’t come back until you smell the meat frying.”

“And miss the big spectacle? This is better than a corn shucking.”

“You ought to be ashamed! Making light of Mistress Amanda and Miss Becky. One mad and the other one dead. Rest her soul.”

“Aunt Sylvie—” Granada began again.

“I swear, girl, if you ask me one more question about that dress, I’ll switch your legs!”

Granada raised her foot, but Sylvie warned, “And don’t you go stomping the floor at me, neither. Don’t know where you get that from. I taught you better. Act like you was reared in one of Chester’s mule stalls.” She shook her head with disdain. “And you supposed to be a house girl, hand-raised.”

Chester slapped his thigh. “Come over here, Granada, and get out of that woman’s reach.”

Granada ran to Chester and put her arm around his neck.

“How about one of Chester’s riddles?” he asked.

Granada nodded eagerly. “I bet I get it this time.”

“Chester, you ain’t happy until you get somebody to guessing some fool thing,” Aunt Sylvie said, greasing an iron skillet.

Chester waved Sylvie off and then turned back to Granada. “All right,” he said, looking around the kitchen, scratching his freshly shaved chin. “I got one. What’s slick as a mole, black as coal, got a great long tail like a fishing pole?”

Granada repeated the riddle and then frowned. “The master’s big black horse?” she said without conviction.

“You always guessing that horse. You way off.”

“I done heard it,” Aunt Sylvie blurted. “It’s an iron skillet. I win. Now give out the prize and get out of my kitchen!”

Before Granada could fuss at Sylvie for spoiling the riddle, the door that led to the great house swung open and in strode a woman as pale as death, her long hair undone, cascading in gray-black ribbons over her dressing gown. Her eyes had the look of someone permanently startled. On her shoulder sat her pet, a tufted capuchin monkey, his little black hands clutching a rope of her hair.

Chester nearly knocked Granada over when he scrambled to his feet to give the mistress a little bow. The girl quickly found her balance and caught the skirt of her shimmy with her thumb and forefinger, curtsying like she had seen white women do. But all the time she kept an eye on the delicate, blue satin gown draped over the mistress’s rail-thin arm.

Mistress Amanda’s maid, Lizzie, followed shortly, holding out before her a pair of dainty slippers, one in each hand. She pulled up beside her mistress and the kitchen became dead quiet. Even the monkey sat motionless on his mistress’s shoulder.

The sight of Lizzie always troubled Granada. The woman had aged into a sullen, yellow-toned creature with one dead, milk-white eye, the other constantly circling the room until it lit on Granada, and there it would stay for long moments at a time. The girl got the distinct feeling that Lizzie was warning her.

It was the monkey that broke the horrible silence. He began to sniff noisily at the cooking smells and made sharp smacking noises with his mouth. Then he dropped from Mistress Amanda’s shoulder, scampered across the table, and leaped into Chester’s arms.

Sometimes Granada was plain jealous of that monkey. Daniel Webster was an anniversary gift from Master Ben and slept in a wrought-iron cage right in the mistress’s bedroom. Sylvie swore the master had to have been drunk to have paid that New Orleans street vendor good money for the dirty beast. But Mistress Amanda loved that monkey. Even though she had a son a few years younger than Granada, it was obvious to everyone the mistress favored the monkey over poor Little Lord.

The monkey was now grinning childlike at Chester and began plucking at the shiny buttons on his coat. When the mistress turned her forlorn gaze to Sylvie, Chester swatted at the monkey’s paws. The beast responded with a high-pitched shriek.

“Take this gown, Aunt Sylvie,” the mistress said, her small voice rustling like dead leaves.

To Granada the mistress seemed to grow more fragile every day, her features more gaunt, and the circles beneath her delicate blue eyes were now dark as old bruises that never healed. The mistress glanced about the kitchen nervously, but never once did her eyes light upon the girl.

Granada knew she would not exist for the mistress until she had changed into the dress, and then only as a shadow, like the silhouette portraits of Miss Becky that were displayed in nearly every room of the house. The mistress hardly ever touched Granada anymore, not since she was a very small child and the mistress would go to sleep holding Granada in her arms. Today she was to wear the dress, remain silent, and stand close, never to leave the mistress’s side when company was around.

“And remember, launder the gown and return it by tomorrow night. You bring it to me yourself.”

Aunt Sylvie brusquely took the dress from the mistress and then coolly studied Miss Becky’s lace cuffs going to yellow.

“You know how Becky was about her things. She wouldn’t abide a wrinkle or—”

“I know what to do, Mistress Amanda,” Aunt Sylvie cut in.

Next the mistress took the shiny leather shoes from Lizzie, who kept her head down, as if not to remind the mistress of her dead eye the color of a porcelain cup. She presented the shoes to Aunt Sylvie, as though she was entrusting her with the most fragile of treasures. “And the slippers—”

“Yes, ma’am. I know,” Sylvie muttered, taking the shoes from the mistress with much less reverence than they were given. “I’ll dust them out good with lime after the girl wears them.”

“Nobody else, Aunt Sylvie. You do it, you hear? Nobody else touches Becky’s things. She never could abide—”

“I know that, Mistress Amanda.”

“If Becky knew that anybody else—”

“Yes, ma’am!” Sylvie broke in again. “I’ll take good care like I always do,” she said bluntly. “I best get busy, then.”

The mistress didn’t make a move to leave. She was searching Aunt Sylvie’s face. After long moments of leaden silence, she released the expression of vague helplessness, and her cold, lifeless eyes lit up with a fiery flash.

Granada tensed.

Lizzie hunched her shoulders and squinched her face, as if she were expecting the mistress to flare up and slap her other eye blind. But today Mistress Amanda hit no one. She abruptly swung about and tromped from the kitchen, uttering not a word. Chester released Daniel Webster, who went scurrying after her. Lizzie’s good eye circled the room once. She breathed deeply and then sped off, hurrying to catch up.

Everyone held their tongues until the hollow sounds of heels clopping down the covered walkway connecting the kitchen to the great house died away.

“She worse ever day,” Aunt Sylvie said, making no effort to hide her disapproval. “Just ain’t right. Acting like she don’t remember she got a little boy still alive and breathing. No, the only one she thinks about is the dead one. I reckon Little Lord looks too much like his daddy to suit her.”

Little Lord was Granada’s best friend, and it pained her to hear Sylvie say he was never noticed, either.

Sylvie gently stroked the satiny softness of the gown draped over her arm. “I remember the first time Miss Becky wore this frock. It was for a children’s tea party up in the bluffs at Delphi. Bless her baby-doll soul. One day Master Ben is going to put a stop to this mess.”

Granada pulled at one of the velvet ribbons dangling from the cook’s fingers. She touched the soft fabric to her lips, kissing it gently. “Put it on me, Aunt Sylvie,” Granada pleaded.

“You keep wearing a dead girl’s clothes,” Aunt Sylvie warned, “and you’ll get her haint after you.”

Granada shrugged. She didn’t believe in ghosts. “The mistress likes me to wear them. And Little Lord said I looked pretty all dressed up.”

Aunt Sylvie planted her fists on her broad hips. “Just because Mistress Amanda is mad enough to parade you around in her dead baby’s frocks don’t make it right. And they don’t make you white and they don’t make anybody love you any more. Little Lord likes you just fine in your kitchen dress.” Aunt Sylvie slapped her hands together. “Look at me, girl, while I’m talking!”

Granada crossed her arms over her chest and gave Sylvie a look of pure exasperation.

“Mark my words. Just as sure as Judgment Day, they going to come a time when the mistress reaches inside that wardrobe for another pretty costume and come up empty-handed. Only one left to wear be the one I put on Miss Becky before I laid her in her grave box. Then what you going to do? Go dig it up?”

Before Granada could think to protest, Sylvie had already drawn her hand back. “And if I see you raising up that stomping foot, I swear to merciful God I’ll—”

Chester laughed at the cook’s outburst. “Sylvie, you think that white girl was the Jesus child.” He turned to Granada with kind eyes. “Them dresses look just as fine on you as they did Miss Becky. And she didn’t have those pretty licorice-drop eyes and skin as fine as the mistress’s best velvet. You just listen to old Chester here. Go on and have yourself a big time. Don’t pay Sylvie no mind.”

“Ain’t no danger in this girl paying me no nevermind,” Sylvie groused, stooping over to pick up the bowl of tallow that had been warming by the fire. “One day, girl, you going to learn that every fine road comes to a stopping place. Better be careful, one day your momma is going to show up and drag you off to them swamps. Then what you going to do? I’ll tell you. You’ll be sad you didn’t pay Aunt Sylvie no heed.”

Aunt Sylvie drew a chair from the table and sat down. “If you can tear yourself away from Chester and his foolishness, come on over to me, baby,” Sylvie said warmly. “I’ll grease your hair.”

This was the Sylvie that the girl loved—the nice one who wasn’t shouting orders and fussing about her kitchen. The one who called Granada “baby.” She hurried to Aunt Sylvie and plopped herself on the floor, wedging between the cook’s knees.

“I don’t know how to explain it where you ain’t going to get hurt,” Sylvie said, dipping two fingers into the bowl. “You too young to understand, I guess. Like I told your momma when she was about your age, half the things you see in any white man’s house ain’t real. But in this particular house, real done took a holiday.”

Before applying the dab of tallow, Sylvie leaned over and kissed Granada on the top of her head. “My pretty baby don’t even know her own momma. Worse, you don’t care. Don’t think I can never forgive the mistress for doing that to you. One day you going to see how all your life, you been tangled up in somebody else’s grief.”

Sylvie sighed. “I reckon it takes age to understand the kind of devilry that even the littlest death can give birth to.”